The Dictatorship of the Proletariat

by Karl Kautsky

Book Overview

Kautsky's assault on the dictatorship of the proletariat as practiced by the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution is one of the most remarkable and controversial documents in the history of Marxism. Written in 1918, it brought attacks from Trotsky and Bukharin and provoked Lenin to Write The Proletarian Revolution and Renegade Kautsky.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0472060961
• ISBN13: 9780472060962
• Release Date: March 1964
• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Brian Wayne Wells, Esquire, reviews Kautsky's"Dictatorship"

This book written by Karl Kautsky in the summer of 1918 was the opening shot in a duel of articles between Kautsky and Lenin and Trotsky which went on until 1921. Although Kautsky had not followed Bernstein and the Second International all the way down the path of the Marxist revisionism, he was disturbed by what he saw as the violent excesses of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the formation of the dictatorship of the proletariat by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. This book was written to set forth his criticsims in print. Lenin responded to this book with an article of his own--the famous "Proletraian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky" written in October 1918. Kautsky then replied with "Terrorism and Communism" in June of 1919. Leon Traosky then answered this book with an article of the same name in 1920--to which Kautsky once again replied in an article called "From Democracy to Statism" which has yet to be translated into English. This series of books relates much about early Soviet ideology and their relations with Marxist parties of rest of Europe.